Sensorial Development

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Early childhood is a "sensitive period" for developing sensory perception, so our Sensorial Development curriculum is designed to develop and refine the child's five senses.


While exploring the sensorial materials in the classroom, our students learn to:

  • Distinguish between visual cues, like size, shape and color
  • Discern different tactile cues of texture, weight, and temperature
  • Identify auditory differences in pitch and rhythm
  • Distinguish between olfactory cues by matching scents
  • Discern taste differences in foods

The Sensorial materials also facilitate the development of three important mathematical skills:

  • The perception of differences: As our students manipulate the classroom materials, like the knobbed cylinders, prisms, cubes, and rods, they learn about differences in thickness, weight, texture, shape, and length.
  • The perception of similarities: Our students learn to find characteristics that are the same within a set as they find matching pairs of objects that have the same color, pitch, smell, or texture.
  • Experience with a graded series: A more advanced mathematical skill presented by our Sensorial materials is grading a set of objects by one characteristic, such as from heavy to light, large to small, thick to thin, and loud to quiet.

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